Research + Writing

I am an historian of education who studies Black education, school desegregation, teacher and student activism, curriculum and pedagogy, and the American High School. My research and writing has been published in academic and public forums. To read and learn more, go here. My main focus of research and writing centers on two book projects:

Protest and Pedagogy: Black Resistance and the American High School, 1890-1990

I am finishing a book, Protest and Pedagogy: Black Resistance and the American High School, 1890-1990, which examines how, and in what ways, high school teachers and students propelled and sustained the Black freedom struggle in Charlottesville, Virginia. Protest and Pedagogy draws upon archival sources, curriculum and pedagogy materials, school newspapers and yearbooks, local, state, and national newspapers, and over forty oral history interviews with teachers and students to trace the change over time at city’s four different high schools where Black teachers worked and Black students enrolled: Jefferson High School (1926-1951), Jackson P. Burley High School (1951-1967), Lane High School (1959-1974), Charlottesville High School (1974-1990). This is not just a story about Charlottesville or Virginia, though. It is an American story which spotlights the resistance of Black teachers and students in the American high school throughout the nation during the twentieth century. Rather than just passive participants in the Black freedom struggle—or outright opponents—this book argues that Black high school teachers and students employed a variety of organizing and protest strategies to make schools and communities more just and equitable spaces. In particular, the pedagogical approaches in the classroom underpinned protest within and beyond schools. At the same time, Black teacher and student organizing, activism, and protest led to pedagogical reforms in classrooms and schools.

Educating in a Burning House: Black Teachers and the Desegregation of Schools, Colleges, and Universities in the South

I have started work on a second monograph, Educating in a Burning House: Black Teachers and the Desegregation of Schools, Colleges, and Universities in the South, 1960-2001. This project is supported by a Spencer Foundation/National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship. On the one hand, many Black teachers and administrators were fired, demoted, and displaced throughout the South in the aftermath of the Brown decisions. On the other hand, there were Black teachers who kept their jobs and desegregated K-12 public schools as teachers and predominantly white institutions as graduate students during the latter half of the twentieth century. This project draws upon more than a hundred oral history interviews from the Teachers in the Movement Oral History Project (TIM), curriculum and pedagogical materials, and archival sources, including the papers of teacher organizations, to examine the contours of Black teachers' desegregation of schools, colleges, and universities in the upper and lower South: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Not only does the project focus on the first decades of school desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s, but it also highlights the change over time as school desegregation reached its apex before the resegregation of schools took hold in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. This history will help illuminate how Black teachers navigated school desegregation, but also the multiple and nuanced factors, beyond Brown, leading to the disproportionate lack of Black teachers in the South now.